Being based in Perth (GMT +8), I have always thought it made sense to have our servers running in the Australia/Perth timezone (rather than UTC).

This makes sense for many reasons, mostly that when we set up a cron job, we can use local time (rather than UTC), which makes life very easy.

Recently our Rackspace Cloud servers and Amazon EC2 instances (both running CentOS) were rebooted after updating the glibc package, which caused each server’s timezone to revert back to UTC.

To set the timezone, I had always created a /etc/localtime symbolic link pointing to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Perth, however it turns out that there is one other thing that has to be done in order to make the timezone setting be persistent across updates and reboots.

The Problem

A spreadsheet of ~1100 people (name, email address, etc) that needs to be imported into a WordPress site as users:

The User Import CSV File

I tried several user import plugins, but I had trouble with some users not importing (duplicate email addresses and/or usernames), and the plugins I tried didn’t make it easy to see which accounts were failing to import and why.

The import process via the WordPress dashboard was also encountering timeout problems due to the large amount of data being imported.

It’s also the first birthday where I’ve taken the day off work. I’ve been putting in some long hours at work since we moved to Perth in December, so I’m making an effort to improve the work-life balance 🙂

The History

The discussions went well, and the following month we hosted the first meeting (which had 8 people in attendance).

1202 days later, I’m immensely proud to say that we have organised 47 WordPress Melbourne User Group meetup events (an average of 1.2 events per month), all of which have helped WordPress users learn and share their knowledge about WordPress and related topics.

The Thank You’s

I’d like to extend a sincere thank you to the following people and companies, who have all played a big part in making WPmelb a success.

Who is organising this?James Collins and Aaron Rutley.
(Two WordPress developers from Melbourne, and organisers of the WordPress Melbourne User Group).

Can I come?
We are keeping the numbers small – places are limited to 10-12 people.If you’re willing to sleep on the floor (instead of in a bed), it is more likely we’ll be able to squeeze you in.
So if you’re interested in coming, please contact me.
This event is now sold out. Please keep an eye on the blog if/when we organise another one of these events.

I can’t make it on those dates. Will there be another one?
No promises, but we’re really excited about this concept, and we’re hoping to make them a (semi) regular event in different locations around Australia.